When asked by a young priest to repeat the sacred ceremonial phrase "to honor and obey," Lupe surprises herself and says. "No, I will not say 'obey'. How dare you! You don't talk to me like this after fifty years of marriage and I now knowing what I know!" After the hilarious shock of Lupe's rejection of the ceremony, the Villaseñor family is forced to examine the love that Lupe and Salvador have shared for so many years -- a universal, gut-honest love that will eventually energize and inspire the couple into old age.

    Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems in which one of the main elements is an ongoing dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible as well as the unconscious. These poems, composed during a fifteen-month period, also deal with being a woman in France, with turning fifty, and with being a poet, and thus seemingly despised or at least ignored. Author Biography: Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California. After a period of peripatetic traveling, she married poet Ted Berrigan. She has published more than twenty books and has been an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York School of poetry.

    From Europe to Hong Kong to Thailand to Cambodia, he hunts the Big Smoke, bewildered by its elusiveness and, despite the meaning it continues to evoke as a cultural touchstone, its alleged extinction. Weaving his spiritual and hallucinogenic quests together with inimitable, razor-sharp prose, Tosches's trip becomes a deeper meditation on what true fulfillment is and why no one bothers to look for it any more.

    Her characters, already marginalized economically and socially, confront what many perceive as an invading outside culture, enduring and at times transcending the loss of their "place," both literally and figuratively. Their stories undermine the assumption that just because people don't articulate what happens inside them, nothing much is happening at all.

    Includes "He Sees you When You're Sleeping" by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark","Louisa May Alcott's Christmas Treasury", " The Christmas Shoes" by Donna VanLiere, and"The Christmas Train" by David Baldacci

    Little writes about the world he used to inhabit, a place filled with drugs, crime and danger at every turn. His electrifying prose brings to life the rough, raw, and seedy life of Boston's underworld where corruption lies at the heart of every deception.Bobbie is a young criminal prodigy. Living in Boston he's approached by a mysterious Greek on behalf of an anonymous shipping tycoon, who wants to commission a theft. The Fogg museum is the target; a collection of ancient Greek coins the score. Everything goes fine with the burglary, but with easy street just around the corner Bobbie's life takes an unexpected twist and his big score evaporates. With his life on the line, Bobbie must learn who he can trust when trusting anyone can make you lose everything. Steel Toes is as close to reality as fiction can get. Little draws you in with his knife sharp writing, his authentic and unflinching characters and plot as tight and strong as the hold of addiction.

    McNulty's characters are the ones you just chatted with in the street, the elevator, or, God help us, in the saloon. He shows us that wherever you look, there's a story."-Frank McCourt "John McNulty, city man and newspaperman, self-assigned in his mature years to human-interest stories of the world around him, left a body of work that throbs with his love of life...American writing in our time developed few men with so keen an eye and so sharp an ear. [He] cannot be replaced."- James Thurber, in his New Yorker obituary of McNulty Author Biography: From 1937 until his death in 1956, John McNulty walked many beats for The New Yorker, but his favorite—and the one that he made famous—was Tim & Joe Costello's, an old-fashioned Irish saloon at Third Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. The place is gone now—it was leveled and replaced by the lobby of a skyscraper in 1973-but it and its hard-living mid-century patrons live on in these twenty-eight immortal stories and sketches, many of them collected here for the first time.

    From the corridors of the FBI's Hoover building to the dangerous streets of the new Moscow, Mesmerized will take you on the roller-coaster ride of a lifetime, climaxing in a great showdown at the home of American democracy itself. After a heart transplant saves brilliant Washington attorney Beth Convey, she inexplicably acquires new tastes and abilities, and finds herself haunted by strange dreams -- or are they memories? Her search for answers leads Beth to former FBI operative-turned-reporter Jeff Hammond. Together they hunt down the truth and discover terrifying top-secret information that could re-ignite the Cold War.